International Laboratory of Paleoecological Reconstruction

One of the most complex problems of the modern Earth science is the necessity to separate the natural and the anthropogenic climate and environment change and their forcings, as well as to harmonise model experiments that demonstrate the variable sensitivity of the Earth's climate and reconstructions based on indirect data. Palaeoecological reconstruction is the key to the understanding of the past, the current and the future climate and environment change.   

The main goal of the project is the creation of a new laboratory of natural and anthropogenic changes of the environment in the past for ultra-high-resolution multi-proxy reconstruction oriented primarily towards new methodologies of the analysis of ice core samples that will be supplemented by an analysis of lake sediments and annual rings of trees, the dating of moraines using cosmogenic isotopes, tephrochronology, and the modelling of the environment and climate change. The laboratory will incorporate an analytical centre, where the main analyses will be conducted, a repository of indirect data and a metadata centre that will store their descriptions. The preservation of unique archives of data on the environment of the past, that are now disappearing due to the modern global, regional and local human activity, is a relevant problem recognised by the international scientific community. Indirect data that will be analysed in the new laboratory will have resolutions ranging from less than a year to a decade. In the same manner as written documents, they recorded various environmental characteristics of the past that can be interpreted in terms of climate and environment change, extrapolating instrumental measurements of temperature, precipitation and emissions of various types of contaminating substances, dust, charcoal particles and carbon-bearing aerosols etc. into the atmosphere to the past period.